SILAC

I'm spending today doing some silac experiments by maldi ms.

Silac is rather elegant technique whereby proteins can be quantified by isotopically labelling arginine and lysine residues in the protein. We can them d digest the proteins to break them into smaller pieces. when we analyse the pieces by mass spectrometry you see a massive shift due to the labelling.

It can be used, for example, to monitor the changes in protein levels in diseased compared to healthy ones.

Molecular characterization of the uncultivatable hemotropic bacterium Mycoplasma haemofelis

Just a quick announcement of our new paper. A predominatly genetics study of the uncultivatable hemotropic bacterium Mycoplasma haemofelis with proteomics (the part which I contributed to) .

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3146833/?tool=pubmed

Mycoplasma haemofelis a pathogenic feline hemoplasma which is responsible for hemolytic anemia in cats.

Unfortunately it can't be cultured and as a result it is very difficult to study its pathogenicity. The aim of the work is essentially to understand the bacteria better by understanding it's genome and proteome.